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Home Fires: Bidding Farewell to Arms

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.

For the past year, I could only provide a frustratingly long answer to the simple, frequently asked question, Are you still in the Army?

When I commissioned as an infantry officer in March, 2000, my contract specified four years of active service and four years in the inactive reserve (I.R.R.) — a name on a list. During graduate school, my answer was simple: Sort of. I’m still a name on a list.

At the eight year mark, I would have been allowed to resign my commission and irrevocably separate myself from the military, but my number came up at the seven year and two month mark, mobilizing me, as the letter said in all capital letters, “FOR 545 DAYS UNLESS EXTENDED.”

Of course, the military had the right to do this according to the contract I signed back in 2000. I was not a victim of new policy. I either knew or should have known — can’t remember which.
The 545 days came and went and I returned safely and soundly from Afghanistan’s Kunar Province to Iowa City where I began reassembling my life. I stayed with a friend, living from two suitcases for the couple weeks it took me to find an apartment, then paid a mover to transport my belongings from the “Garage-Mahaul.”

I’d hardly begun unpacking my old life when another letter arrived. It read “SUBJECT: Election of Options after Fulfilling the Mandatory Military Service Obligation (MSO),” and asked me to select one of four boxes on the enclosed A.H.R.C. Form 4145.

One box requested transfer to a reserve unit — the guys who train one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer. Another was for retiring officers with twenty or more years of qualifying service.

The two others interested me. One read “I elect to remain a member of the I.R.R.,” and the other, the choice I had been thinking about for a very long time, read “I hereby tender my unqualified resignation as a Reserve officer of the Army, USAR, under the provisions of Chapter 6, Section III of . . . . I understand that if my resignation is accepted, I am entitled to an honorable separation and will be furnished an Honorable Discharge Certificate.”

I have no idea what to make of that ominous “if” in the last sentence.

Nevertheless, given my visceral opposition to our foreign, undeclared wars the choice should have been quick and easy. It was not. Partly out of nostalgia for the responsibility and fraternity I once enjoyed, and partly from wanting to keep my employment options open, the letter remained taped to my refrigerator for a full year, and the simple question, Are you still in the Army?, now drew a long-winded response.

When friends followed up by asking if I could get recalled again, I repeated the rumor I’d heard that involuntarily mobilized service members could not be recalled again for a full two years. I told them, however, that when I tried to confirm the rumor with the many recruiters who rang my cell phone, they’d say the only sure way to avoid another call-up was to join their unit, because they have non-deployable slots available well suited for someone like me, and would I like to join them?

The Army provides. You get recession-proof employment, full medical and dental care, good schools for your kids, and an exquisitely defined role in the world. You can see paychecks and meals and a sense of purpose from here to the horizon.

Those first few mornings without your tribe or your uniform asserting your identity can be very lonely. They were for me. I realized how few people would miss me if I did nothing on any given day. I worried about money and about what I’d do next.

So, I kept the door open, just a crack, and felt comforted that the letter taped to my fridge might slam it shut at a moment’s notice.

Day by day, the civilian world around me grew more familiar and comfortable. I taught a class at the University of Iowa. An Army buddy and I reunited to climb Africa’s tallest mountain. Given how well we knew one another from our time Afghanistan, it was hard for either us to believe the Kilimanjaro adventure was our first interaction outside the military. We summited before sunrise on January 13, 2009.

I worked as a Web developer and technical editor, and in the summer, took my mother to visit the place of her birth near Lviv, Ukraine, where relatives I never knew of treated us lavishly. Over vodka, cognac, homemade wines, homegrown vegetables, freshly cured cheeses and fish from the nearby lake, they taught me family histories that made all my problems seem frivolous by comparison.

Life is a privilege. I now recognize that responsibility isn’t gone when you leave the military, it is changed. Greater by far than the responsibility to comrades in arms is responsibility to friends, family and self, responsibility to the one life each of us gets to live. Such responsibility is harder to recognize because it is long and slow and unlikely to manifest itself in some violent sacrifice.

I would also say that greater than the adventure of fighting our government’s wars is the adventure of pursuing your own happiness in this world.

Such adventure and such responsibilities are truer because they originate not by decree, but from our humanity — from nature or nature’s God, as it were. More is required to be successful and more is awarded when we are.

After about a year of waiting, I hereby tendered my unqualified resignation.

Roman Skaskiw served as an infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and Iraq. After three years of civilian life, he was recalled from the inactive reserve and deployed with a Provincial Reconstruction Team to Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. He lives in Iowa City.

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Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. The project originated in 2007 with a series of personal accounts from five veterans of the Iraq war on their return to American life. It now includes dispatches from veterans of wars past and present.